[Plugin: BWP Google XML Sitemaps] HTTP Error 500, but pages remains accessible

  • I ran into a weird bug with the BWP Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

    A wordpress news website i’m working on was shown as being offline by two different uptime monitoring services.

    In addition, error reports started increasing on the website’s Google webmaster tools profile, all of which were HTTP Error 500 Internal server error. The errors made googlebot flag the pages as inaccessible.

    The weird part was that the pages being reported with that error were accessible and so was the whole website even though it was being reported as offline.

    Disabling/Enabling the plugins filtered down the error to this plugin.

    Apparently, while the website was accessible, an HTTP Error 500 Internal server error was being returned in every header request and this plugin was causing that error.

    I disabled it and i’m currently comparing alternatives.I just wanted to report the bug in this plugin, cause it could have some seriously negative SEO effect and the website appears to be function properly when its not

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  • Thread Starter Adonis Nafeh

    (@adonisnafeh)

    i replaced this plugin with the Google XML Sitemaps, this one just generates a sitemap and not a full sitemapindex.
    I’m using pingdom to monitor the website now. The service sends alerts and push notifications to an iOS app in case the server is down or if the website starts sending the 500 error again.
    This is really a severe problem, and it can have a huge impacts on SEO. Pages are getting flagged as inaccessible and makes them a candidate for removal from the search engine. The number of crawl errors reported by google webmaster tools was staggering.
    I had to replace the sitemaps in google webmaster tools, bing webmaster tools and google custom search engine, i think it will take few days before the website i’m working on fully recovers from this bug.

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